Growth Rate Contracted Logos

What it measures

The velocity of your customer base, not its size. The logo growth rate takes the net change in unique contracted logos — new customers signed minus customers churned — and expresses it as a percentage of where you started. It deliberately ignores deal size, so a logo is a logo whether it pays $500 or $500K a year. That makes it a clean read on whether your acquisition engine is outrunning your churn, comparable across companies of vastly different scale.

Why it matters

You track the logo growth rate because customer count is a leading indicator of future revenue, and it decouples acquisition from deal size in a way ARR growth can't. A business can post flat ARR growth while signing logos fast (lots of small deals) or grow ARR on expansion alone while logo count stalls — the logo growth rate tells you which. Operators use it to judge whether the sales engine is scaling and retaining; investors use it because, given enough time, a company with steady high logo growth and good retention dwarfs one growing only by deal size.

How to read it

A positive logo growth rate means you're acquiring customers faster than you're losing them; negative means the base is shrinking. Read it as a trend, never a single snapshot — if it's falling month over month, decompose it: is new acquisition (new contracted logos) slowing, is churn (churned contracted logos) spiking, or both? Always pair the rate with absolute new and churned logo counts so a flattering rate on a small base doesn't fool you. When logo growth runs below your CARR growth rate, growth is shifting toward deal size and expansion rather than new logos. A negative rate is a red flag: losing customers faster than you sign them means revenue follows within a few periods, and product, positioning, or market fit is in question.

What good looks like

Watch-outs

• Ignoring the base. A high logo growth rate on a handful of customers is fewer logos in absolute terms than a modest rate on thousands. Always pair the rate with absolute new, churned, and net-new contracted logos before celebrating.
• Mixing time windows. A monthly rate compounds very differently from a quarterly or annual one — quoting the logo growth rate without naming the period makes plan-vs-actual and peer comparisons meaningless.
• Forgetting churn in the denominator. If your starting base includes a high-churn cohort, next period's growth rate can look weak even when new acquisition is strong. Segment by cohort age and segment to see what's really moving.
• Conflating logo growth with revenue growth. Strong logo growth can coexist with negative ARR growth if new customers carry lower ACV than the ones you're churning. Read it alongside new-carr and churned-arr for the full picture.

Worked example